Nikki Igol has a dream job that’s just about unheard of these days: She is an image archivist and researcher who pulls visual inspiration for the fashion world’s greats. “I had a rule when I started: I only want to work for legends,” she tells me defiantly as we hang out at Library180 , a new research library in the Financial District that she co-founded this year with a former V Magazine colleague , Steven Chaiken.

Igol was 11 years old and living in a Detroit suburb when she came across four issues of Details magazine from the 1980s at a garage sale. “I literally lost my mind — I had never seen a fashion photograph before,” she recalls. Soon her mom was shuttling her to vintage-clothing stores to hunt down out-of-print periodicals, catalyzing what would become a lifelong obsess

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